LANGUAGE FAMILIES of SOUTHEAST ASIA Laurent Sagart
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LANGUAGE FAMILIES OF SOUTHEAST ASIA Laurent Sagart To cite this version: Laurent Sagart. LANGUAGE FAMILIES OF SOUTHEAST ASIA. The Oxford Handbook of South- east Asian Archaeology, In press. hal-03099922 HAL Id: hal-03099922 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03099922 Submitted on 6 Jan 2021 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. LANGUAGE FAMILIES OF SOUTHEAST ASIA Laurent Sagart, CNRS and INaLCO, Paris <1> Introduction Five language families are represented today in the region and in south China: Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Tai-Kadai (also ‘Kra-Dai’), Hmong-Mien (formerly ‘Miao- Yao’) and Sino-Tibetan (sometimes now ‘Trans-Himalayan’). With the exception of Austronesian, which is only monophyletic with the addition of Tai-Kadai (below), there is broad agreement among linguists that each of these groups goes back to a private ancestral language. There is broad agreement also as to the affiliation of most of the individual languages in the region. The Andamanese languages and Kusunda, a moribund language of Nepal, are isolates. <2> Austroasiatic The Austroasiatic family extends from southeast Asia (‘Mon-Khmer’, map 1) to north India (‘Munda’, map 2). The family’s distribution is characterized by extreme territorial fragmentation: Austroasiatic has become dislocated under the penetration of Tai-Kadai, Hmong-Mien, Austronesian and Sino-Tibetan. Lepcha or Rong, a Tibeto-Burman language of eastern Nepal, and Acehnese, an Austronesian language of NW Sumatra, include an Austroasiatic substratum. Witzel’s claims about an Austroasiatic presence in pre-Indo-Aryan northeastern India (Witzel 1999), based on apparently prefixing loanwords of unknown origin in the Rg-Veda, seem quite speculative. Several of the Austroasiatic etymologies of Chinese words which Norman and Mei (1976) say indicate an old Austroasiatic presence in south China and the Yangtze Valley are errors (Sagart 2008), yet the Chinese name of the Yangtze River: jiāng 江, Old Chinese *kˤroŋ, has been regarded as an Austroasiatic toponym (compare Old Mon kruŋ ‘river’ and similar forms). There are, however, probable Sino-Tibetan cognates (STEDT database, set #2322). Map 1. The Mon-Khmer languages. Source: The Language Gulper (http://www.languagesgulper.com/eng/Austromap.html). Map 2. The Munda languages. Source: The Language Gulper (http://www.languagesgulper.com/eng/Mundamap.html). Austroasiatic linguistic typology is of an East Asian type: monosyllables, or disyllabic words with final stress and reduced first syllables; mostly derivational morphology using prefixes and infixes; object-final word order. The Munda languages show evidence of having adapted to the south Asian type after the breakup of proto-Munda: this implies an East Asian origin in a region not too far removed from the Sino-Tibetan and Austronesian homelands. A small number of basic vocabulary items shared by Austroasiatic and Hmong-Mien have suggested to Pejros and Shnirelman (1998:155) and others that the two are genetically related. There is also evidence of a shared Y-chromosome haplotype between Hmong-Mien and Austroasiatic peoples, and the same genetic marker has been found in skeletons from Daxi culture (Li et al. 2007). However, an episode of intimate contact between the two groups in the middle Yangtze is an alternative explanation. Until about 2000 tHe dominant view was that the family had two branches: Munda vs. all the rest (‘Mon-Khmer’). Diffloth (2005) carved a third, northern branch (‘Khasi-Khmuic’) out of Mon-Khmer; he identified elements of a diversified vocabulary of rice and argued from plant and animal names for a tropical homeland, in the Burma/Bengal region at an impressionistic 5000 BCE. Sagart (2011a) notes that the Austroasiatic vocabulary of rice is independent from the other East Asian groups, implying an independent Austroasiatic domestication of rice. Arguing from negative evidence, Sidwell (2008) presents the family’s phylogeny as a rake of a dozen or so equidistant branches; yet failure to detect tree-like structure can be due to problems with cognate-word encoding and should not be regarded as final. Taking consideration of the Austroasiatic subsistence vocabulary reconstructed by Shorto (2006)—words for taro, yam, rice as well as for the boat—, Sidwell and Blench (2011) propose that the Austroasiatic family broke up after group(s) of hunter-gatherers practicing tuber-culture in the Mekong valley acquired rice agriculture. They argue that the arrival of rice, c. 4100 BP in the northern part of region, precedes and partly triggers the Austroasiatic dispersal, which they place at c. 3800 BP. However Sidwell and Blench’s assignment to Proto-Austroasiatic of individual vocabulary items is intimately dependent upon Austroasiatic phylogeny, which is disputed, as we have seen. The circumstances surrounding the formation of Austroasiatic await clarification. <2> Austronesian Most Austronesian languages are spoken in insular southeast Asia and the Pacific (map 3). Map 3. The Austronesian languages. Source: The Language Gulper (http://www.languagesgulper.com/eng/Austronesmap.html). There is broad agreement among linguists that the homeland was in Taiwan, at the nortHern end of the family’s territory, and where the highest diversity in the family is found. The sound correspondences across Austronesian languages are relatively well understood, allowing for several good-quality Proto-Austronesian reconstructions by TsucHida, Blust, Wolff. All the Austronesian languages outside of Taiwan (‘Malayo- Polynesian’) share linguistic innovations, e.g. the change of *S to an h-type sound and the replacement of *S by *s in ‘nine’. This shows that speakers of an early Austronesian language of Taiwan, in which these and other linguistic changes were already completed, established settlements, presumably in the northern Philippines, out of which the rest of the Austronesian world was eventually settled. Sagart (2008) argues from shared innovations in the system of numerals that Proto-Malayo-Polynesian was part of a southern Formosan group. Hung (2008) similarly notes that southern Taiwan is the precursor of the earliest neolithic sites in the northern Philippines; Chang et al. likewise (2015) demonstrate a south Taiwan origin for the domesticated paper mulberry carried by the expanding Austronesians. Remarkably consistent dates for the initial Austronesian settlement of Taiwan and for the out-of-Taiwan event come from archaeology (Hung 2008), linguistic phylogenetics (Gray et al 2009) and population genetics (Ko et al. 2014): c. 3500-3000 BCE and c. 2000 BCE. Judging from the reconstructable Proto- Austronesian vocabulary, the first Austronesians built houses (*Rumaq), weaved cloth and baskets (*tenun ‘to weave’), had boats (*qaCu, *qabaŋ), fished with fishnets (*aray), practiced hunting/warfare with bows (*buSuR), kept dogs (*asu), and raised pigs (*beRek); they cleared swiddens (*qumah) to grow Setaria italica (*beCeŋ), Panicum miliaceum (*baCaR) and japonica rice (*panyay), as confirmed by finds of charred grains at Nan Kuan Li and Nan Kuan Li East, two 3rd mill. BCE sites on the southwest coast of Taiwan (Tsang et al. 2017). Proto-Austronesian is usually equated with the Ta-Pen-K’eng culture in Taiwan (Hung 2008). The absence of archaeological antecedents and the similarity with contemporary archaeological sites on the mainland side of the Taiwan straits argue that the first Austronesians reached Taiwan from the mainland by boat in the late 4th millennium BCE. Analysis of the evolution of the numeral systems shows that the first Austronesian languages to branch off were those in northwest Taiwan (Sagart 2004), where the straits are narrowest and Taiwan is visible from the mainland: this was probably where the first Austronesians set foot. A northern point of entry is confirmed by human and plant genetics (Ko et al. 2014; Chang et al. 2015). In the post-Taiwan period, the pace of Austronesian settlement quickened, thanks apparently to improvements in nautical technology. The Philippines were settled, followed by Borneo, Sumatra, the Celebes, the Sunda islands, Maluku, Timor, New Guinea and from there the rest of the Oceanic world: Micronesian, Melanesia and Polynesia. Speakers of proto-Chamic, a language related to Malay possibly from Borneo, may be behind the Sa Huynh culture on the coast of Vietnam. A later migration by boat out of Borneo brought Austronesian speakers in contact with the Bantu languages on the east coast of Africa and Madagascar c. 400 CE (Adelaar 2009). Outside of Taiwan, the Austronesians received gene flow from preexisting populations who also at times shifted to Austronesian languages: this is sometimes interpreted as evidence for an Austronesian presence in the Sahul plate region in Paleolithic times: that cannot be true in a linguistic sense, at least. Cultural contact introduced the expanding Austronesians to new food resources such as the banana, sago and yam: the availability of these resources allied to changes in the natural environment led to rice and millet being